Stress
by Lif61
Summary: Alex has to sit through a school assignment about stress and it brings up memories about her past.


**A/N: Written for week 5 of SPN Hiatus Creations 2019. Prompt: Wayward Sisters.**

**WARNING: This story contains graphic depictions of violence, some non-consensual themes (not all sexual), and child abuse.**

* * *

"What is stress?" Mr. Ferro asked.

Alex glanced at the clock, her arms crossed, idly observing the few students who actually had their hands raised. She was sitting in a mandatory six-hour health class taught by her gym teacher. The six hours would be broken up at least, and they were starting with stress, as if she didn't know the topic already.

Students ticked off various answers, most of them using the word _stress_ in their answer or _anxiety_, and not getting to the point. Alex knew it well. It was part of a survival instinct, a fear response, letting you know when your life was in danger.

_The large, older man was touching her leg. She was ten, in a pink dress, alone in a house with him. Her house, the house she was growing up in. Her pulse was beating quickly, and she kept thinking, _What if...? What if...? What if...? _What if her family didn't get to her in time? What if they didn't kill this man? What if they let him have fun with her? Alex knew what he wanted. She wasn't stupid._

_Her family killed him, and she watched them drink, bloodying their faces. She smiled, but still her heart thrummed, and all she could do was stand there, frozen._

"Stress is like when you have a really big test," Emily answered, a girl who _thought_ she was a know-it-all, but really wasn't. She could talk your ear off for hours about all these "facts" she'd learned, and you could go look them up and they'd all be just a bit wrong.

"That's an example," Mr. Ferro said, bald head shining under the too-bright school lights, even in the basement room they'd been crammed into.

Alex was really thinking she should've ditched this class to go smoke weed under the bleachers. She was getting stressed just sitting here.

"Come on, anyone know? I know you guys are smart."

_Alex sat at a table with her brothers, age eleven. They'd put a cup in front of her, a dare. It was nighttime, their fangs out._

"_Come on, you gotta try it," one of them urged, lightly bumping her arm._

_She jumped, startled by the touch._

"_It's good."_

"_For you, maybe," she argued, feeling so small in that moment._

_She put a hand to her neck, rubbing at the scar there. They'd bitten her last month, taking from her when she hadn't been able to lure any men to the house for them to feed on. She'd failed and she'd paid the price. It'd kept her up at night. And now they were doing this, teasing her, trying to get her drink what they drank._

_It wasn't their blood, but it wasn't something she wanted._

_The teasing grew worse, with them jostling her, getting in close to her face, her neck, until she was crying, and she took the cup, and downed it._

_They weren't there for when she threw up the blood and was hyperventilating, shaking, and then hiding in her closet, hoping it'd be awhile before they came looking for her._

"It's a survival instinct," Dominic, captain of the basketball team, shouted out.

"Okay, now we're getting somewhere."

_The nest, her family, was fighting, teeth bared, biting each other, blood flying, screaming, screeching. Alex, her heart in her throat, sweating, feeling as though she was going to be sick, hid in what was supposed to be the pantry, under one of the shelves and covered herself with a blanket until Cecelia got her and told her it was over._

"What for?"

"Predators."

_Age thirteen, and they were biting into her neck. Alex had wanted to run, had wanted to fight, but then they told her there'd be no one to take care of her._

_They were right, weren't they?_

_They'd tied her down so she wouldn't accidently struggle._

_They drank from her, and she grew weak from it, but not weak enough to feel fear, to feel stress._

Alex sat in the back of the room, trying to not run, to not cry, as Mr. Ferro wrote out on the board, saying, "Stress is the body's reaction to real, or perceived danger, and it can put us into three states: fight, flight, or freeze. We have it to survive."

Survive.

Alex had survived.


End file.
